Tales from fourth grade.
This is a collection of very very short stories about my fourth grade year. It’s part of a thing I’m working on, and I promise you that they are funny and heavily pop cultured, but if you don’t want to read about the woes of 11 year old Gynomite, I won’t fault you for that.
I had the dubious honor of being in our little school’s Academically Gifted program, which meant that at the beginning of the day, someone would come and get me from my regular class and take me to a classroom with the 20 other “gifted” kids in the school. Ten minutes before the end of the day, I would be taken back to my class again. I don’t know why we couldn’t just be in our AG classroom all day, but I think it was to maximize our torment from other kids. The AG class was mostly boys, so I managed to just barely make the cutoff for an actual girl clique! We called ourselves The Sensational Six, as there were six of us, and we would have never hung out were it not for our collective ostracism from other kids. The most ambitious of the group, Christine, made us all matching sweatshirts covered with buttons and bows. We wore them. A lot.
Signs of the Pop Culture Apocalypse
1. Pam Anderson showing up somewhere looking gorgeous and not all used up.
2. Victoria Beckham in loose-fitting jeans and flip flops.
3. MTV playing music videos again.
On Monday the network starts “AMTV,” a six-hour block for music and advertising experimentation. From 3 to 9 a.m. Monday through Thursday, it will show music videos, news, interviews and performances, harking back to the network’s origins as a 24-hour home for music videos.
All we need now is for Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes to admit their marriage is a sham, or for Madonna to reveal her true cyborg form, or Paris Hilton shunning life in the spotlight to study birds in Africa, or for Lindsay Lohan to actually act in a movie. Then the pop culture hell would rain down on all of us. Because we are all sinners, every last one of us.
For no reason at all, it’s Madonna naked.
These pictures, sent to me by my lovely friend/hairstylist/kinda-employee Caroline, are of Madonna in the early 80s, and they are gorgeous. You forget that the iconic conceptualization of Madonna that we know of today was once a pretty young dancer that needed money and had an attitude. The pics are very NSFW and hirsuite, so be aware of that before you jump.
Post number 2 about how I saw Madonna coming out of the Kabbalah Center on Saturday!
I found pictures!!!!
Katy Hill and I are literally right next to the guy in the striped shirt. REALLY!!!! Kumail and Vivek are on the other side of the Escalade! Go here to see the rest of them, and for fun, scour the pictures for hints of us! (You won’t find any, but I enjoyed doing it)
25 years later, and she still can’t wear pants!
Neary just sent me this fantastic Madonna video from 1983, and I love it love it love it. The little choreographed moves? The backup dancers? Priceless!
(skip the first minute if you’re allergic to annoying weirdly made up emcees in tuxedos)
An Open Letter to Tom Munroe, Madonna photographer
Listen, you seem like a really good photographer. I know you’ve shot Madonna for Elle Magazine, and those pictures were gorgeous. Excellent lighting, nice positioning, etc and so on. And I know Madonna can be a bit of a bear to work with… I mean, not from personal experience as I’ve never been within a mile of her, but I’ve grown up with the woman, and adore her like people adore their favorite dish that mom makes- comforting in its tastiness and predictability, and every once in a while, it makes a really good pop song.
Dance!
I don’t consider myself a sophisticated dance aficionado. I just like what I like. Here are a few of my favorite dance performances, kicked off by Neatorama’s gushy praise for the Bollywood number on So You Think You Can Dance. Big ups to Neatorama for drawing my attention to it- I would have never known otherwise, which either proves or disproves that I’m an aficionado of dance. Skip to 1:15 to start the actual dance.
I’m a big fan of Bollywood dance- myself and my girl Trish were the only white girls that got to dance in my other girl Vaishali’s huge Hindi wedding back in 2002, and at Kumail’s parents’ house I get to watch a lot of Desi dance programs straight from India. I took one class in it and found that it’s severe movements just didn’t suit me. I looked like I was having a seizure. Here’s more!!
A hodgepodge of things to look at
First, let’s start with this article in the New Yorker that someone told me about last week that I cannot get out of my head. It’s about a woman with a history of drug addiction and serious illness that developed a maddening scratch on a specific spot on the right side of her head, and she scratched it mercilessly, even in her sleep, until she woke up one morning with brain fluid pouring out of the hole in her skull!!! Fascinating story, and horrifying.
Videos of my life
I have nothing especially witty or interesting to say about these two videos, except to say that these were two of my favorite songs, and that both of these videos became blueprints in my brain for the kinds of places I wanted to hang out, and the kinds of hair I wanted EVERYONE to have.
I present Information Society’s Pure Energy
And Madonna’s Get Into the Groove
I’m still looking for people who play air violin in clubs.
